Activists fight gay culture

Critics say the group focuses only on 'extreme elements.'
BOSTON (AP) -- When they spotted the mannequins in a Macy's department store window celebrating the city's Gay Pride week, Brian Camenker and other activists at MassResistance jumped into action.
They posted a photo of the window on their Web log and encouraged supporters to call the store in protest. Within days, Macy's had removed the mannequins but left up a list of pride week events.
It was a victory for a group that has taken on gay-themed school texts and nearly persuaded Gov. Mitt Romney to eliminate a state commission for gay youth in Massachusetts -- the only state to allow same-sex marriage.
"People feel that as a society they're under assault -- that you can't walk down the street anymore without having this in your face," said Camenker, 53, of Newton.
MassResistance has drawn criticism from gay-rights activists who say Camenker and his supporters are obsessed with the more extreme elements of gay culture and are trying to deny rights for all gays across the state.
"Brian Camenker and MassResistance is the fringe of the fringe. They are bottom feeders," said Marc Solomon, campaign director at MassEquality, a coalition of gay-marriage rights advocates. "I really don't get it. It's an obsession. He spends more time looking at gay Web sites than anyone I could imagine."
But as Massachusetts lawmakers prepare to consider on Wednesday an amendment to the state constitution banning gay marriage, Camenker says he represents the state's true silent majority.
"There is a huge group of people who are very upset about what's been going on in the social sphere," said Camenker, who opposes gay marriage but also the amendment because he doesn't believe the state constitution needs to be changed.
Not his first campaign
Camenker, who is married with two teenage children, has a long history of taking on charged topics in Massachusetts. By the mid-1990s, his Parent's Rights Coalition had successfully championed a parental notification bill giving parents the option of pulling their children from sex-education classes.
In 2000, his group again made headlines, secretly taping graphic sexual talk -- such as whether to use condoms and how to have oral sex -- during a workshop for gay teens. Gay activists denounced the secret taping, which cost two members of the state Department of Education's HIV/AIDS awareness program their jobs because of the explicit nature of the talk. One of the workers later sued and was given her job back.
But the 2003 ruling by the state Supreme Judicial Court, which paved the way for the nation's first legal same-sex marriages, took Camenker's fight to a new level.
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